Then, Snow
by OneDollarFlipFlops
Summary: His lungs burn, his legs shake, and somewhere along the way he's landed funny on his right foot because his arch hurts when he stumbles forward as the curse lifts. Henry's whereabouts between escaping Killian and the reunion on Main Street during Shattered Sight. Hence, spoilers for the episode. Mentions of Outlaw Queen and Regal Believer.


Henry runs along a washed out path in the woods, the textbooks in his bookbag thumping against his lower back even though he's looped his thumbs through the shoulder straps to pull the bag flush against his body.

_Keep going._

The curse churns in his chest, a slow, aching pressure razing his heart, pressing against the bars of his ribcage, demanding he leave the safe haven his mother created for him and seek _him_ out. From a small corner in his mind, his rational self watches and curls around the grain of surprise at how readily petty hurts and deeper betrayals have popped to the surface, like an ice cube he'd tried to hold below the surface of his soda with a straw, only to have it slip free and rejoin the others cubes clinging to the surface.

_Keep going._

His destination is still further into the woods, almost at the town line. He's going to get there despite his body's cries to slow down, catch his breath, pace himself.

Then, snow.

Fat flakes drift through the trees and land on his face, clinging to his eyelashes. The relentless energy keeping him awake and moving and thinking and brooding through the night seeps into the ground. His lungs burn, his legs shake, and somewhere along the way he's landed funny on his right foot because his arch hurts when he stumbles forward as the curse lifts. Hands on knees, he leans forward and hangs his head, bookbag sliding up and almost over until he shrugs his shoulders to push it back into place. When his breathing calms he straightens and turns in a circle. Gray clouds are still spilling snow through the pocketed openings in the tree canopy, but it's clearly daytime now. At least he knows exactly where he is, has walked this exact path many times. He should turn around and go back to town before his mother finds him gone from her office and burns through the town looking for him, but he can't seem to make himself take that first step.

Instead, he chucks his bookbag into the dirt and sits on a fallen conifer, hands pressing into the rough bark. The curse is broken, has to be broken, because the insatiable urge to _go_ is gone, but the unsettling darkness in his chest remains. It's starting to feel like too much pepperoni and pineapple pizza, _Heartburn, his mother would say, shaking chalky antacids into his hand while he sat on a stool at the kitchen island,_ but he knows it's not as he rubs his chest to try to relieve the pressure without vomiting.

"Henry?"

He braces his knee against the tree as he turns to see who's calling his name, and pushes down the wave of panic as he sees Robin Hood walking toward him. The older man has a few cuts across his face, and his right hand sports scraped knuckles, but otherwise he seems as though his night has been uneventful, if long.

"Robin," Henry says, standing, brushing bark from his palms, hoping Robin doesn't see his hands shaking, or at least writes it off as dissipating adrenaline.

"Are you all right? What are you doing out here in the woods?"

"I'm fine. I was running away from someone when the curse broke and ended up out here." Technically, it's somewhere between the truth and a lie because he was running from Killian and toward Robin's camp, but now that the curse is over his attempt to find the thief seems like a moot point.

Robin frowns. "How did you escape your mother's protection spell? She seemed confident no one would be able to break it."

"Killian had some kind of way to lower the barrier. He wanted me to come with him somewhere, and I didn't want to go, so," Henry shrugs, "I called him a dirty pirate and ran."

Robin chuckles and claps a warm hand on his shoulder. "I'm glad you're unharmed."

The gesture is meant to be reassuring, is not so different from the motion he'd made when he and his mother had come to warn the outlaws about the curse yesterday, but Henry can't help the small step away from the overture, and when Robin frowns slightly, he knows he's going to have to tell him the real reason he'd come to the woods.

The older man surprises him, though, by instead asking if he's seen either of his mothers to let them know he's okay, and Henry shakes his head.

"I haven't seen anyone except you since I left Mom's office."

"Well you'd best be on your way back to town, then."

"Aren't you going to come, too?" _To see my mom? To make sure she's okay? Because that's the first thing I'm going to do._

"Not yet. I need to find Will Scarlett. He's the one who hid my boy and Marian."

"Oh, well, last I saw him, he was running down Main Street yelling something about Hook."

Robin sighs. "Right. Seems I'm to accompany you after all. Shall we?" he asks, holding an arm out for Henry to walk in front of him.

The last thing he wants to do is walk back to town with Robin, but there seems to be no way to get out of it, so Henry slings his bookbag across his shoulder and starts walking.

"Henry," Robin says once they're further down the path. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"You seem a bit troubled."

Henry shrugs. "It was a long night," he says.

"Yes, it was, and a rather unpleasant one at that."

He can feel it there in his chest, the ugliness pushing at his willpower, shoving the words up his throat, and he tries to hold his breath to keep the sentiments inside him where they can't hurt anyone but himself. He has to breathe, though, and he lets go of the air in his lungs and, by some miracle, manages to say something other than the poisonous accusations burbling up. "This curse, it made you think things that you really feel, but won't say to people."

"That's how your mother explained it, more or less."

"And now that it's over, those thoughts should go away, right?"

"Well, now, I don't know about that," Robin says, pushing a bare tree branch out of his way. "I can only speak from personal experience, of course, but I found the curse to be more about lack of impulse control than bad thoughts."

"Impulse control?"

"Indeed."

Henry's not stupid, he can tell Robin is being deliberately casual, just like when his mom came to read comics with him after he'd failed to help Emma, and it's still a little weird when he has these moments when he can see the way adults are trying to talk to him without scaring him away.

"I think we all have darkness inside," Robin continues, slowing his pace as they come to the part of the path that's become a snarled mess of tree roots.

_I bet this is where I stepped wrong_, Henry thinks as they pick their way down the rough terrace.

"We have two choices. We can acknowledge the darkness or push it away and hope for the best." Robin holds out a hand to help Henry down the last ledge. Henry ignores it and jumps down, wincing at the impact on his foot, but he's turned his face away so Robin won't see.

"Personally, I've found my life is better in the long run when I do the former."

"But," Henry says. "How do you acknowledge darkness without giving in to it, without hurting people?"

"I think it depends on the situation. You can find someone you trust and talk with them. Or try to find a constructive outlet to channel the emotions you're feeling."

Henry is quiet, and Robin allows him the space of silence as they continue walking toward town. Maybe the things he'd come to say to Robin should be said. Maybe he could even say them to Robin instead of someone else, because, really, who else would he talk to about this kind of thing without them taking it the wrong way?

"I'm tired of all the adults in my life sucking."

Henry keeps walking, has picked up his pace, though when his foot starts throbbing again he regrets it. Now that he's started talking he's not sure he's going to be able to stop all thoughts ping-ponging inside his skull, already rattling down the chute leading directly to his mouth. Behind him he can hear Robin stop short for a moment, then twigs snapping and pine straw being shuffled as he jogs to catch up to Henry.

"I'm not familiar with 'suck', but I think I can infer the meaning, and I'm not sure either of your mothers would approve of your use of the word."

"You're not my parent. I don't have to listen to you." There it is. Another thought loose in the world. The inky _thing_ in his chest crows with every sentence spoken, and there's a sharp spike of sadness as he realizes this ugliness may in fact just be a part of him and not some construct of the Shattered Sight curse.

Robin's hand lands on his shoulder, but instead of the friendly weight from earlier, there is a hint of steel in his grip. Henry stops walking, turns to look at him with a scowl already on his face.

"If we're going to have this conversation, we're going to stop and we're going to look each other in the face and talk about it like civilized men, understand?"

"Fine," Henry says, jerking his shoulder out of Robin's hold. He should apologize for the sharpness in his tone, the lack of respect that would horrify his mother, but he doesn't want to do what she would require of him, what any of them would tell him to do.

Robin says nothing, waiting for him to continue, arms folded for a moment before he drops them to his side.

Now that he has permission to talk, Henry finds himself suddenly unable to form coherent sentences.

"Would it help if I told you nothing said here would leave the forest?" Robin asks.

"It might."

"Then consider it done."

Henry takes a deep breath, looks down, looks back up, begins to speak.

"Emma has trouble controlling her magic and Mom has trouble controlling her darkness, and they both think, thought, the best way to do that was to shut me out. Grandma and Grandpa have Neal and Emma to deal with now. I don't even know where to start with Mr. Gold. My dad just died and I didn't even know who he was when it happened. And to top it all off, there's you.

"My mom tries so hard not to be a villain, and you made her feel like her love for you is something wrong and twisted. Do you know what she did? After that night at the diner she didn't want to see me." The words are tumbling out of his mouth, taking a life of their own as they spring off his tongue, but this last sentence makes him stop and listen to the horrible rightness of what he's saying. "My mom has never, ever, not wanted me, even when I didn't believe in her, even when I told her over and over again that she wasn't really my mom."

The snow is still falling, but faster now, collecting in small drifts at their feet, neither of them paying it any attention. He's done a good job of looking Robin in the eye during his speech. Now that his thoughts are out in the open, though, swirling through the air with the snow, his cheeks heat, and he can't look at him anymore.

"Henry," Robin says, his voice brittle in the cold air. Henry looks up at the thief, surprised to see sadness has replaced the stoic, neutral set of his face. "In all my time knowing Regina, she has never once not wanted you. Not for a thousandth of a second, in this land or the Enchanted Forest."

Oh, he wants to believe him, but he wasn't there. He doesn't understand. "She told me to stay away."

Robin shakes his head. "I don't claim to know why she told you to stay away, but what I do know is that everything your mother does, everything both your mothers do, they do for you, Henry, to keep you safe, bring you happiness, keep you healthy. If Regina told you to stay away, she must have thought it was for the best."

"That's what Emma said, and it wasn't."

"Have you spoken to Regina about how you feel?"

Henry nods. "I went home. Told her I wasn't going to give up just because she had. That I was going to keep coming back and she couldn't stop me."

"Good boy. Good man," Robin amends, a small smile creasing his face.

"I know you don't control what she does. I _know_," Henry says, lifting his hand to his head. "But this curse, this feeling," he taps his chest, "I want to blame you for it anyway. Even though I'm not even mad at her for it anymore."

"Even adults struggle to make their heart and head agree on things, with varying degrees of success."

"What happened?" Henry asks. "Why did you leave?" This time the words aren't spoken in anger, no anguish tainting them, only curiosity.

"Love," Robin says, "Is the most powerful, complicated, beautiful thing we have in our lives, and because of that power and beauty, it is often mishandled, abused, and left in the hands of careless, foolish people. Let me make myself clear: I love your mother, but a long time ago I loved Roland's mother in much the same way. I believed I would never see her again. When I saw her in the diner, I saw the mother of my child back from the dead. I don't know how to describe that feeling to you adequately without being a parent, a spouse, yourself."

"Oh, come on. I hate when adults use that excuse," Henry says.

"If it makes you feel any better, we hate it, too. But the situation remains, and it's a rather unfair situation because you're growing up, and we adults no longer have the innocence of childhood shielding you from our mistakes, if such a thing is even possible."

Robin places his hand over his heart like he's going to say the pledge of allegiance, which makes Henry want to laugh at the image of Robin standing beside his desk at school, reciting the words with his classmates while filching his neighbor's pencil. The impulse to laugh vanishes with Robin's next words, though.

"I'm sorry for the way my actions have impacted you, Henry. I've been a poor example for both you and Roland, and I'm afraid I have no excuse other than to say that I'm only human."

"A-apology accepted," Henry says, startled that after yelling at an adult, he is the one on the receiving end of the apology. "And I'm sorry for being rude."

"Apology accepted," Robin says, nodding once and then smiling.

"Do you hate me now?"

"Of course not. If I am lucky enough to be back in your mother's life some day, I hope you will always tell me what you're feeling."

Henry nods. "I hope we have that opportunity."

"Good. Now, is there anything else you'd like to say? A comment toward my personal grooming or clothing choices, perhaps?"

"No, I think I'm good," Henry says.

"Then we'd best be off."

They turn and walk side by side the rest of the way to the town, neither one speaking. Soon they can see Main Street, and Henry catches a glimpse of his mother walking with his grandparents, and he feels as though his smile is going to crack right off his face. Robin declines to join him, saying he is going to find his son and wife first, but to give his mother his best. Henry shakes his hand and sets off at a run, ignoring the pain in his foot and the achy feeling in his chest because in a few moments he is going to be hugging his mother, and there is nothing else he wants more than this in all the realms.

* * *

><p>AN: Thanks for reading! Is is considered AU when you rewatch the episode your story is based on and realize your character did not in fact take his bookbag with him when he left the office? _Details._


End file.
